Connecting SLCE with Sustainability in Higher Education: Cultivating Citizens with an Ecocentric Vision of Justice

Abstract

We write from one core conviction: We cannot have thriving, justice-oriented human communities and robust intellectual mindscapes when the ecological systems upon which all life depends, now and in the future, are ignored and destroyed. Thus, an important future direction for service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) is to collaborate with the sustainability in higher education (SHE) movement. SHE is a diverse, transdisciplinary area of inquiry and practice that seeks to help lead efforts to create a "thriving, equitable and ecologically healthy world" (AASHE, 2015). When SLCE seriously attends to ecological sustainability--when it becomes ecocentric--the movement can cultivate ecologically-literate, place-engaged, planetary citizens who value and nurture justice for both human and other-than-human inhabitants. When SLCE and SHE collaborate, we can more readily see ourselves as contributing members of a comprehensive Earth community and Earth's "inarticulate but not silent" ecologies (Hall, 200, p. 124) as stakeholders and partners in transforming human communities. Whether referred to as "landscape" (the symbolic environment created when physical spaces are transformed by the conferral of human values and meaning onto them; Greider & Garkovich, 1994) or as "place" (a particular assemblage of humans and their multiple "others"; Duhn, 2012)--or with some other term--Earth's ecological systems are all too often taken for granted. Many of us fail to acknowledge our biological, social, cultural, and psychic interdependency with the interactive communities within which we dwell. At the physiological level, the iron in our blood, the water in our tissues, and the calcium in our bones are not only the same elements that constitute mountain ranges and seascapes but also move in perpetual cycles between and among our bodies and the rest of the planet. We are part of a continuum of matter and energy that began billions of years ago. We cannot disconnect from this fact anymore than we can ignore how the ecological-social-political-cultural stories of the land we inhabit and the diversity of entities we encounter inform who we are as humans and the roles we play within every ecosystem on this planet. Humans cannot flourish when the ecologies out of which we emerged millennia ago are degraded, themselves unable to flourish or even function. If Earth dies, we die. The many beings we encounter--their very otherness, their intrinsic and instrumental worth, their needs and roles, and their potential lack of a future --ought to inform dialogues concerning the forming and functioning of human communities. Ecosystems deserve more respect as unique partners within SLCE dialogues since these webs of life are not only the medium or stage for social change but also deeply fashion the worldviews, identities, cultures, and behaviors of those working in partnership for social transformation. Meaningful engagement with Earth's ecosystems as partners is not an entirely new idea for the SLCE Future Directions Project (SLCE-FDP, of which this thought piece is part) or SLCE more generally. In their 2015 FDP thought piece titled "Engaging Place as Partner," Siemers and colleagues propose "integrating ecological perspectives and values" as one foundational principle of authentically "place-engaged" SLCE. Their claim is that place is not neutral; each place with and within which SLCE occurs has a "particular local voice, history, culture, politics, and ecology." All of these facets of place are vital to SLCE, and merely focusing on place as the location of human activity creates SLCE "tourists" rather than learners, "thin and non-systemic learning and change," rather than holistic systemic learning and engaged citizenry, and neutral placement sites rather than interactive spaces for engaging place and people as partners (Siemers, Harrison, Clayton, & Stanley, 2015, p. 101). There are many examples of SLCE courses and programs that, to varying degrees, embrace ecological perspectives and values as part of efforts to transform human communities. …